Broadcast network content or programming is commonly provided in conjunction with associated informational content or assets. These assets include advertisements, associated programming, public-service announcements, ad tags, trailers, weather or emergency notifications and a variety of other content, including paid and unpaid content. In this regard, assets providers (e.g., advertisers) who wish to convey information (e.g., advertisements) regarding services and/or products to users of the broadcast network often pay for the right to insert their information into programming of the broadcast network. For instance, advertisers may provide ad content to a network operator such that the ad content may be interleaved with broadcast network programming during one or more programming breaks. The delivery of such paid assets often subsidizes or covers the costs of the programming provided by the broadcast network. This may reduce or eliminate costs borne by the users of the broadcast network programming.
In order to achieve a better return on their investment, asset providers often try to target their assets to a selected audience that is believed to be interested in the goods or services of the asset provider. The case of advertisers on a cable television network is illustrative. For instance, an advertiser or a cable television network may target its ads to certain demographic groups based on, for example, geographic location, gender, age, income etc. Accordingly, once an advertiser has created an ad that is targeted to a desired group of viewers (e.g., targeted group) the advertiser may attempt to procure insertion times in the network programming when the targeted group is expected to be among the audience of the network programming.
Advertisers on the networks have typically attempted to select insertion times for their ad content based on audience classification information provided by audience sampling companies, such Nielsen Media Research Corporation. In broadcast television, audience sampling has often been performed via the monitoring of a small sample of selected households. The households are ideally selected to be representative of the universe of viewers. Specifically, specialized equipment is provided to the selected households where demographic information of each household is known to the sampling company. The specialized equipment is operative to record the viewing habits of the household and periodically report the same. The reported viewing habits of the monitored households are then compiled and sorted to determine, for example, overall market share by channel, by program, as well as by one or more demographic groups (e.g., male, female, etc.).
Audience sampling information in some instances allows advertisers to effectively identify programming periods for their ad content during which a targeted group of viewers are expected to be present. For instance, the audience share and demographics of a long running television program may be well established. Accordingly, advertisers having products targeted to the putative interests of the audience may advertise during the television program.
However, in instances where little or no historic information is available for a program or programming period, audience sampling information may be of limited value. For example, for low share networks the Nielsen sampling groups are often too small to accurately estimate information regarding the viewing audience. That is, the size and/or demographic make-up of a viewing audience may not be well estimated or even known. Accordingly, advertisers may be reluctant to purchase advertising time during such periods and/or advertiser may provide ad content that is not well targeted to the actual viewers of the program/programming period.
To better target viewers of, for example, low share networks, various different targeted advertising systems have been proposed. Often, such targeted advertising systems have been incorporated into set-top boxes that have access to current viewing information associated with users of the set-top boxes. These targeted advertising systems typically utilize such current viewing information to select assets from storage media and to provide the selected assets to users. However, such systems have not found widespread acceptance as the systems require that substantial resources of stored assets to effectively target different groups of network users. Due to the necessity of storing assets at the set-top box, specialized set-top boxes have been required to implement previous targeted advertising systems. Accordingly, previous targeted advertising systems have not been backward compatible with existing user equipment, thereby increasing the costs associated with implementing such systems. Finally, previous targeted advertising systems have required the periodic transmission of large amounts of updated assets (e.g., new advertisements) to the specialized set top boxes. Due to limited available bandwidth, such periodic transmission has been problematic.